Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Loonook" data-source="post: 5898767" data-attributes="member: 1861">I just don't want to push my players... I know they're trying to play the field, explore options, sow their wil...Oh, in game engagement.  Personally I believe in a good calibration setting 'sessions' for RL games, and usually run them  at least once every 6-8 sessions.  Usually I give it about an hour at the beginning of a session (though It may take a whole session if something needs to be worked on/discussed!).   It gives a good time to check sheets, make sure everyone is present, accounted for, and properly statted, do all of your 'tune up' operations, and also get a general consensus of how the game is going.  I usually don't mind a bit of bad morale among certain types of players (you sign up for a hack and slash dungeon crawl and are upset your high levels of Profession (Floral Arranger) haven't come into play?) but being able to establish an open forum prevents your players AND PCs from suffering.  I have made minor corrections (everyone hated this accent or do we really need to run so many encounters with X layout [Lazy DMing due to work led me to a streak of cookie cutter encounters <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ]) to major turns in the direction of the game (a PC wants to have been knocked up by that demon they all fought escaping the dungeon... everyone okay with this weird turn of events?  Someone is thinking of retiring their character and wants feedback on what to do)... It also gives a good time to just sort of breathe in the gaming space, which when you've been running a lot of back-to-back intense sessions in certain types of games can be nice.This also prevents character fatigue from setting in.  You thought character X sounded good on paper but are not feeling them?  Alright, figure out where to go from there.  Gives a good outlet for the players to discuss goals, things they might want to bring up, check in on NPCs and plot happenings, and keeps everything running clean.I'm a big fan of tweaking things until you get them JUST right.  It's like tuning a guitar... You're probably near tune, but sometimes you want to get it down to the cent and just have that perfect tone... And sometimes the damn thing doesn't hold the tune after a few rough days of play <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.Slainte,-Loonook.</blockquote>

Verification